A Chronicle of Pro Musica in the United States (1920-1944) PDF Download

Author: Ronald Victor Wiecki
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Author: Paula Elliot
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
The Pro-Musica Society (first known as the Franco-American Music Society) was established in the early 1920's by pianist E. Robert Schmitz to support North American appearances of rising European composers and performers. By 1925, Pro Musica boasted over twenty chapters which maintained contact via their quartly publication edited by Germaine Schmitz, the wife of the society's founder. Pro-Musica Quarterly (also known by its earlier title, F.A.M.S. Bulletin) served a varied readership, from highly-trained musicians and sophisticated consumers to society patrons and local enthusiasts. From this publication, for example, supporters learned of international music movements, living composers' lives and works, and theoretical and historical approaches to the study of music. They also read news of regional meetings and recitals, finding between two covers an unusual balance of content. Introduced by a historical overview of the Society and the publication, Pro Musica: Patronage, Performance and a Periodical provides analysis of the content and detailed descriptions of all articles published during the publication's existence, 1923-1929. Comprehensive subject and author-translator indexes add to the strength of this document that chronicles representative musical activities during an extraordinary decade of the twentieth century. Those enthusiasts of musical and social activities during the 1920's will find this to be required reference material.

Author: Deniz Ertan
Publisher: University Rochester Press
ISBN: 1580462871
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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The first full-length study of a remarkable composer, writer, painter, and expert on astrology, based on Rudhyar's personal archives.

Author: Carol J. Oja
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190281626
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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New York City witnessed a dazzling burst of creativity in the 1920s. In this pathbreaking study, Carol J. Oja explores this artistic renaissance from the perspective of composers of classical and modern music, who along with writers, painters, and jazz musicians, were at the heart of early modernism in America. She also illustrates how the aesthetic attitudes and institutional structures from the 1920s left a deep imprint on the arts over the 20th century. Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Virgil Thomson, William Grant Still, Edgar Varèse, Henry Cowell, Leo Ornstein, Marion Bauer, George Antheil-these were the leaders of a talented new generation of American composers whose efforts made New York City the center of new music in the country. They founded composer societies--such as the International Composers' Guild, the League of Composers, the Pan American Association, and the Copland-Sessions Concerts--to promote the performance of their music, and they nimbly negotiated cultural boundaries, aiming for recognition in Western Europe as much as at home. They showed exceptional skill at marketing their work. Drawing on extensive archival material--including interviews, correspondence, popular periodicals, and little-known music manuscripts--Oja provides a new perspective on the period and a compelling collective portrait of the figures, puncturing many longstanding myths. American composers active in New York during the 1920s are explored in relation to the "Machine Age" and American Dada; the impact of spirituality on American dissonance; the crucial, behind-the-scenes role of women as patrons and promoters of modernist music; cross-currents between jazz and concert music; the critical reception of modernist music (especially in the writings of Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfeld); and the international impulse behind neoclassicism. The book also examines the persistent biases of the time, particularly anti-Semitisim, gender stereotyping, and longstanding racial attitudes.

Author: Nancy Toff
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199883556
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Georges Barrère (1876-1944) holds a preeminent place in the history of American flute playing. Best known for two of the landmark works that were written for him--the Poem of Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Density 21.5 by Edgard Varèse--he was the most prominent early exemplar of the Paris Conservatoire tradition in the United States and set a new standard for American woodwind performance. Barrère's story is a musical tale of two cities, and this book uses his life as a window onto musical life in Belle Epoque Paris and twentieth-century New York. Recurrent themes are the interactions of composers and performers; the promotion of new music; the management, personnel, and repertoire of symphony orchestras; the economic and social status of the orchestral and solo musician, including the increasing power of musicians' unions; the role of patronage, particularly women patrons; and the growth of chamber music as a professional performance medium. A student of Paul Taffanel at the Paris Conservatoire, by age eighteen Barrère played in the premiere of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. He went on to become solo flutist of the Concerts Colonne and to found the Sociètè Moderne d'Instruments á Vent, a pioneering woodwind ensemble that premiered sixty-one works by forty composers in its first ten years. Invited by Walter Damrosch to become principal flute of the New York Symphony in 1905, he founded the woodwind department at the Institute of Musical Art (later Juilliard). His many ensembles toured the United States, building new audiences for chamber music and promoting French repertoire as well as new American music. Toff narrates Barrère's relationships with the finest musicians and artists of his day, among them Isadora Duncan, Yvette Guilbert, André Caplet, Paul Hindemith, Albert Roussel, Wallingford Riegger, and Henry Brant. The appendices of the book, which list Barrère's 170 premieres and the 50 works dedicated to him, are a resource for a new generation of performers. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories in both France and the United States, this is the first biography of Barrère.

Author: Catherine Parsons Smith
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520933834
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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In this fascinating social history of music in Los Angeles from the 1880s to 1940, Catherine Parsons Smith ventures into an often neglected period to discover that during America's Progressive Era, Los Angeles was a center for making music long before it became a major metropolis. She describes the thriving music scene over some sixty years, including opera, concert giving and promotion, and the struggles of individuals who pursued music as an ideal, a career, a trade, a business--or all those things at once. Smith demonstrates that music making was closely tied to broader Progressive Era issues, including political and economic developments, the new roles played by women, and issues of race, ethnicity, and class.

Author: Martin Brody
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580462456
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Combining cultural analysis with historical and personal accounts of a century of musical life at the American Academy in Rome, this volume provides a history of the AAR's Rome Prize in Composition.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Canada
Languages : en
Pages : 678

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Provides historical coverage of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes information abstracted from over 2,000 journals published worldwide.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 616

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Abstracts of dissertations available on microfilm or as xerographic reproductions.

Author: Anthony Marcus Lien
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Modernism (Music)
Languages : en
Pages : 1144

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Although the art song was a favorite genre for American composers at the turn of the twentieth century, its favor declined rapidly and significantly during and after the 1910s, and for the rest of the first half of the century the genre held a marginalized place in the output of the most significant American composers. Concomitant with this decline in song composition, song publication also declined considerably after 1920, and a significant percentage of the songs published thereafter were authored by composers who specialized in songs and shorter works expressly intended for the domestic song market and written in a conservative musical idiom which appealed to mass audiences. In contrast to these earlier declines, the number of song concerts in New York City and Chicago increased steadily until about 1930, even as the percentage of song concerts to other concerts held steady. After 1930, however, the number and percentage of song concerts in these two cities declined as well. The emergence of modernism on the musical landscape in the United States after 1915 was largely responsible for the decline in song publication and composition. Among other things, musical modernism valorized dissonance, melodic fragmentation, and objectivity; these characteristics ran counter to the largely Romantic orientation of the art song with its long-spun lyricism and subjectivity. As a revision of current thought, this study broadens the accepted corpus of modernist composers to include neo-Romantics such as Samuel Barber whose music retained an essentially Romantic character but was frequently imbued with modernistic elements. This study also shows that composers in certain stylistic, professional, and demographic categories wrote songs in significantly greater numbers those in others. For example, in looking at the total song output of over 100 American and transplanted composers, there was a direct correlation between musical style and song production; the more progressive a composer's musical style, the fewer songs he authored. In addition to the impact of modernism on the art song, these declines were also exacerbated by the art song's close association with other song types which lowered the art song's aesthetic credentials.